High RAM Usage Potential Solution and Questions

Recently I started experiencing an issue where my project that has been in the works for a couple of years now was suddenly using about 9GB additional RAM. This made it impossible to play standalone because the Editor + the Standalone game process was bumping up against my page file and causing an “Out of Memory” crash every time.

After dolting around on the internet for a while and then remembering that stat mem exists in the console, I discovered that the 9GB usage was being eaten by navigation. But I have no navigation setup and nothing should be checking navigation anyway. So I started digging and eventually found in World Settings an option labeled “Auto Spawn Missing Nav Data”. Turning this off cleared the entire 9GB of memory.

Now the issue and question. What exactly is the function of a rubber duck? No but actually it turns itself back on every time I restart the editor. The only way to stop it was to disable nav with Null Nav Sys Config and I have not messed with nav yet so my questions are as follows:

Will this interfere with my ability to add, or impact the functionality of, nav volumes I place in the future for “AI” (regular NPCs/Enemies)?

Will this affect the player’s interaction with the world? It’s my understanding that nav is just for npc logic.

Where did this even come from? It was not an issue until now and I have not messed with any nav settings so I have no idea what I did to trigger the issue in the world and/or the nav/project/world settings.

  1. Did you switch versions of engines?
  2. Did you add any new plugins?
  3. Did you add any new assets?
  4. Did you check for corrupted file a size that is giant?
  5. Do you have have revision control where you can DIF between versions of all files?
  6. If 9GIGs is breaking your system then you might need to move to 32BG I run 128GB on my dev box the last 4 years. Having Browsers with tabs, Maya, Photoshop, Substance, and Unreal running X number of clients or standalone mode and editor can be heavy if things are about to go to ■■■■ I can open the task manager and see 100GB I start closing things down or reset.
  7. I would also clean out my cache files, including the DX cache in the appdata folder, and all your builds, shaders, etc. Reset your system and see if it recreates the issue.

Hope this helps!
-V

Hi, thats just Unreal Engine stuff. Its best not to look at Unreal Engine as a software for publishing or finishing projects on, just use it as a prototyping tool.

It does not work and you will have to use another engine, you will not be able to get to production with it, its just a prototyping tool.
You didnt buy any assets from marketplace did you?

What type of project are you working on?

Source 2 works for your final project, not as easy to use as the Unreal Editor but Unreal Engine is more or a prototyping tool and Source is for finishing projects etc.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_2

What are you talking about? Unreal Engine is used in many products that ship everyday.